Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/566

 524 Reviews.

and which have contributed so much to the discussion of anthropological problems during the last dozen years. Of the second it will be sufficient to say that it continues the acute and original series of reviews of works, whether in the shape of books or of single articles, on sociological and anthropological subjects, and that its intrinsic importance is in no way diminished by its divorce from the initial Memoires that used to appear in the same covers.

The volume of Melanges by Messrs. Hubert and Mauss is a reprint of three articles already published, two of them, — namely, those on Sacrifice and on the Origin of Magical Powers, — in previous volumes of the series, and the third, — on the Repre- sentation of Time in Magic and Religion, — separately. They are here preceded by a Preface in which the authors expound the connection between the three and the ideas which underlie their researches, and incidentally answer objections to method and results. The republication of these articles in a cheap and handy form will render them more useful to students of folklore, and it is to be hoped will cause them to be more widely known and studied. Students who are already acquainted with them will turn with interest to the Preface. The defence of the authors' position it contains is to some extent a retrospect of the steps by which they have reached that position. But it is more than this, for in replying to objections they are led to the enunciation of general principles and results. The summary analysis of the idea of Sacredness, for example, deserves careful comparison with that recently put forward by Mr. Marett in his masterly lecture on The Birth of Humility. Mr. Marett's analysis is the more detailed and exact ; but, while it covers much of the same ground and so far agrees with that of Messrs. Hubert and Mauss, it approaches the subject from a different starting-point. Mr. Marett is a psychologist : Messrs. Hubert and Mauss are sociologists. They insist on Sacredness as a social phenomenon : he views it primarily as the expression of the complex emotions of the individual soul. Neither of these aspects can be safely neglected. A clear com- prehension of the interaction of the social relations with individual impulses is necessary to enable us to read the half-effaced hieroglyphs of the genesis of religion. For the French authors